


Farming and Other Ways To Past the Time

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Childhood Memories, Feel-good, M/M, Stress Baking, Trans Male Character, farming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The costume was a bundle set of cheaply made overalls with fake dirt painted on, grass stains, a plastic-straw made hat and some dirty boots. It was overpriced, badly made and completely unfit for any child to wear.Kei loved it.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei
Comments: 5
Kudos: 54





	Farming and Other Ways To Past the Time

**Author's Note:**

> This was a gift for the best person on twitter @chukishima! I hope you all enjoy this as much as they did!

As a child, Tsukishima Kei went through some varying degrees of obsessive phases. 

His mind never lingered on the extremes of life, choosing to instead sit back and bask in the simplicity of all that was good and calm. From the young age of 5, as his mother would shop for different dresses and bows in the store, he would stare longingly at the almost  _ enchanting _ costume aisle that had clothing ranging from cavemen to firefighters. Again, very extreme. What really caught his eye, captivated his attention (the kind of captivating where you slowly walk away from your mom as she looks at the price tags of children’s shoes and pale shimmer green skirts that  _ aren’t cute at all _ ) were the farmer overalls. The costume was a bundle set of cheaply made overalls with fake dirt painted on, grass stains, a plastic-straw made hat and some dirty boots. It was overpriced, badly made and completely unfit for any child to wear. 

Kei loved it. 

After begging and giving his mother the ‘sad face’ (barely there frown, simple twitch of the lips, upset turn of the eyes to a direction separate from his mother’s eyes and finally a quiet hum) he found himself walking out of the store, left hand holding his mother’s hand and right clutching onto the bag holding his new farm gear. 

From then on his love for farming just grew and grew. He would wake up in the morning and sleepily attempt to put his overalls on before enviably getting his leg stuck in one of the holes and then awkwardly waddled his way into either his mother’s or his brother’s room silently asking for help. Once dressed he put his badly made ‘real-deal-not-your-mother’s-basic-farm-boy’ boots on and, unless he found himself having to potty, went to go sit in the back yard with his straw hat on and a tired smile on his face. Usually, his mother could find him asleep in the grass, breathing easy as the sun’s warm rays covered him like a personally made blanket. This phase of his life saw him leaning towards plants and hard work (hard work defined as instead of watching cartoons as his mother cleaned up and cooked for him, he instead helped her by trying to put his toys away by himself and getting ready in the morning alone). 

The change could have been caused by the fact Kei was a naturally independent child at heart or the fact he was simply growing older (as one does), but the farm loving child liked to believe it was all because of the costume he cherished oh so much.

::

At 9 Kei found himself enamored with the idea of space. 

His love for dinosaurs had begun a few years earlier when he stumbled into his brother’s room and actually  _ looked  _ at the items inside it for once (they didn’t think this love for lizards was going to end anytime soon) but past that he wasn’t that interested in much. Volleyball and dinosaurs seemed to be the only thing that untreated Kei, and while that was fine in the moment, it was something his mother tended to worry about on those nights where she passed by Kei’s (newly painted green) room and watched his sleeping form. The constant documentaries about prehistoric creatures were admittedly cute at first but after 2 months of rewatching the same shows and reading the same books, she just wanted her child to do something— new. And cute. She could use some new cute Kei pictures (his grandmother demanded to see her darling Kei in some new dresses or skirts or something. She was usually tuned out) 

So when Kei spoke up one day about wanting to go to space, the mother and brother across from Kei couldn’t be happier. 

But it wasn’t… cute. Not in the conventional ways. See, Kei had seemingly grown out of his  _ ‘I’m-wearing-this-costume-every-waking-moment’ _ phase and broke into the newly discovered ‘ _ science is cool and so are facts!’  _ phase. This meant two things:

  1. Kei thought learning about space was the coolest thing in the entire world.



  1. The only thing cooler than #1 was trying to learn about dinosaurs IN space.



So Kei learned. God did he learn. His already very fast-paced mind grew quicker as more information was stuffed inside it. The Tsukishima family (thanks to Kei’s randomly generated facts about space and dinosaurs) became experts on all things lizard and black holes. Akiteru would find himself humming the ridiculous little song Kei had begun singing about space and the planets. He was teased relentlessly by his friends and classmates for humming and sometimes even muttering the lyrics to the children’s song but they weren’t laughing as hard when Akiteru passed their astronomy  _ ‘identifying the planets _ ’ test with the highest score in their class. 

So the love for space and all things academic continued until one day after school Kei came home with fat, wet tears streaming down his face and the sound of his cries ringing in Akiteru’s ears. When asked what was wrong Kei reluctantly told his mother and brother about what Haru-chan had said after snack time in class. 

“So I was in class and I was drawing my dinosaurs in space, the ones I always draw with the T-Rex, Velociraptor, and Troodon, they- they were in space and I showed my teacher and she showed the class! And I was really happy with the drawing because all the stars looked straight and I colored inside the lines well and it was really nice and— and Haru-chan, she- she said-”

“She said?” His brother replied at the break in the retelling. The crying had stopped and Kei was given a juice box to suckle on as he rubbed at his puffy eyes.

“She said dinosaurs wouldn’t be able to breathe in space and they’d DIE!! They wouldn’t DIE they have HELMETS!”

...

“Right?”

After some reassurance of ‘ _ no the dinosaurs won’t die _ ’ and  _ ‘yes helmets do help people so dinosaurs should be fine too’ _ with a few loving pats on the back from Akiteru for good measure, Kei seemed to be back to his quiet but happy self. Sadly his classmates seemed to be insistent on their belief in the fact dinosaurs can’t possibly go to space. Luckily Kei had found that since he was the smartest, tallest and most  _ dinosaur-knowing-est _ kid in his class, he didn’t have to believe the words of people who knew nothing. 

Eventually, his entire class began to believe him and his facts about his space dinosaurs (true or not) and as in previous years, Kei was feared and praised for his genius thoughts and cool attitude. 

::

At 13 Kei’s cold attitude had become more of a frozen box keeping him away from everything else. He was, by his own choice, closed off from the rest of the world. 

After his brother had officially broken his heart a few months prior with the whole volleyball mess, dinosaurs in space had lost its boyish charm and instead turned more into  _ ‘the black abyss of nothing and everything has an extinct species floating around inside it and everything is cold and dead. They do not have helmets’.  _ It didn’t help that his mother was finding it a bit difficult to convince the school to give them a boys uniform for Kei to wear (Akiteru’s was too short, unfortunately) because with his current uniform, anytime Kei had to be in school, he was upset in school. 

So with all the stress of new emotions, new views on life and a lack of new dinosaurs to appreciate, Kei needed something to take his mind off the mess of his life, a new outlet. 

So he learned to cook. 

Kei had a bad habit when beginning new hobbies, of letting his own hesitance act as an obstacle in his way. Unlike when he was younger and things were simple and bright in his mind, now the lasting impact of mistrust and overall unhappiness seemed to show everything in a dark light. Cooking wasn’t that bad though. Cooking didn’t take thought. It just was about following rules. Kei did that perfectly. 

Cakes, cookies, brownies, tarts— anything sweet he could make he did. His family came to appreciate the sweets more for the fact that the baking helped Kei relax more than their delicious taste. 

Once Akiteru took some of the sweets to class and when asked about which cute girl made him such adorable snacks, Akiteru just smiled softly.

“My little brother made these!”

::

At 16 Kei found himself waiting in the third gym staring at the backs of the 3 older students across from him. He watched as they laughed and loudly commented about something or another before the conversation dwindled into a short-lived silence of 4 minutes. The only sounds in the gym came from the sound of sneakers walking across the floor and balls being spiked across the net. 

Kei blinked and suddenly the 3 people turned to 2 and before he could turn to look he felt a hand on his shoulder. 

There stood Kuroo. Tall but not too tall, stupid but not really and very good looking. That Kuroo. 

“Tell me a fun childhood story Tsukki!”

Kei stared up at Kuroo (for once) and felt his heartbeat a little faster and hated every second of it. Maybe it was because he was tired; maybe it was because Akiteru had texted him an hour before sending 6 heart and smiley emojis in a row; maybe it was the completely disgusting fact that Kei was a weak, weak boy and when asked to share a story by someone who looked like they  _ really  _ wanted to hear about it, he couldn’t say no. So he spoke.

“Well, I don’t know if this is ‘fun’ per se, but I used to wear a farmer costume everywhere when I was 5 or something…”

Kuroo laughed. Kei tensed. Kuroo sat down next to Kei. Their shoulders touched. Kei tensed more. 

“Adorable. Tell me more.”

“Well- do you like space?”


End file.
